This
web page contains an excerpt from the manuscript submitted by Ivan Davidson
Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, eds., for Orientalism and the Jews, Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 2005. The web page here is for the sole
use of Ivan Kalmar’s students. There is no warranty that its text corresponds
exactly to the published version. If you wish to quote or refer to any of this
“Introduction” in a publication of your own then you must refer to the
published version alone. (This does not include term papers.)

At the turn of the twenty-first
century we are painfully aware that in spite of growing globalization there
remains in the world a split between the West and the rest.The manner in which this split has been
imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense
cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of “orientalism.”The term “orientalism” has in this debate
referred to the western image of the “Orient,” usually with a focus on the
worlds of Islam (and not, as the uninitiated might suppose, the Far East).In this
book we wish to demonstrate that orientalism has always been not only about the
Muslims but also about the Jews.We
believe that the western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed, and
continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with western perceptions of
the Jewish people.

The major objective of this
volume is consequently to demonstrate the urgency of making connections between
the study of orientalism and the study of Jewish history.We seek to throw light on these connections,
to raise new questions relevant to both fields of inquiry, and to stimulate
future research.Each contribution –
written, we hasten to add, from a variety of vantage points, not all of which
necessarily agree with the editors’ - has been selected not so much because it
says the last word on its subject, but rather in order to invite further
discussion and expansion.

The central fact around which
all debate on orientalism and the Jews must be formed is that, historically,
Jews have been seen in the western world variably and often concurrently as
occidental andoriental.Even today, when the Jews are generally
thought of as a western people, that perception is nuanced by the fact that
unlike any genuinely western state Israel (home not only to Jews of
European background but also to millions of “oriental” Jews and Arabs) is
located in the East.More importantly,
the Jews are identified, both by themselves and by the Western world, with the
ancient Israelites who established themselves, and the monotheistic tradition,
in that same “oriental” location.It is
this latter identification with the biblical lands that allowed Jews to be seen
during the centuries as an “oriental people,” a perception challenged only in
the twentieth century as the result of Jewish-Arab strife in the Middle East.The
German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder expressed the once
standard Western conception of the Jews when he wrote that they were the
“Asiatics of Europe.”

Orientalist representations of
the Jews have always been at the very center of orientalist discourse, which we
believe to be based historically in the Christian West’s attempts to understand
and to manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others.Strangely perhaps, one benefit of studying
the Jews as a topic in orientalism may be the discovery of the extent to which
orientalism has been not only a modern Western or imperialist discourse, but
also a Christian one, with roots deep in the middle ages.

The Literature:Orientalism,
Colonialism, Zionism, and Beyond

Following the publication, in
1978, of Orientalism by Edward Said, the overwhelming importance of the
Muslim Orient to Western history was driven home by a good number of excellent
contributions by Said himself (he died in 2003), his followers, and his
critics.In contrast, orientalist
sensibilities about Jews may appear to be a minor issue, comfortably treated as
a relatively autonomous appendix to what really matters.

The historical record, however,
does not justify such an ancillary role for orientalist representations of the
Jews.In fact, Jews have almost always
been present in one way or another whenever occidentals talked about or
imagined the East.How biblical Jews
formed, since the Middle Ages, the model for Christian depictions of Muslims is
demonstrated in this volume by Suzanne Conklin Akbari,
who deals with medieval English literature, and Ivan Davidson Kalmar, who
surveys the history of Christian orientalism in the visual arts.

Akbari and Kalmar’s contributions concern orientalism
well before the late eighteenth century, where debates on orientalism commonly
begin.But if anything, the heyday of
orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by
ever increasing concern with the Jews.Importantly, the modern versions of imperialism and antisemitism were
both born at about the same time, in the second half of the nineteenth
century.There were other correlations
between imperialism and the image of the Jews: Tudor Parfitt’s essay provides
an astonishing range of examples of how many of the Western protagonists of
imperialism “discovered” real or imaginary Jews, including the Lost Tribes of
Israel, almost wherever their expeditions took them.Xun Zhou details the process as it affected China and its
supposed Jews who, she argues boldly, were nothing but a Western invention
encouraged by enterprising locals.Last
but not least, Zionism developed in the context of, and in many ways as a
response to, this twin concern in the Gentile West with both overseas expansion
and the Jewish people.Today modern Israel is at
the vortex of turbulent East-West relations and (as Dalia
Manor, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
and Derek Penslar point out) orientalist attitudes by Israelis target not only Arabs
but also the Mizrahi (“oriental”)
Israelis with roots in the Arab world.

Given, then, that western
discourses about Muslims have almost always had something to do with western
discourses about Jews, why has more work not been done on orientalism and the
Jews? Of the historical correlations just listed (and there are others, as we
shall soon see) only that between orientalism and Zionism has received vigorous
attention by scholars focused on orientalism.

There can be little doubt that
one reason is political.Edward Said was
a leading spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, while most Jewish Studies
specialists identify with Israel.Said was very likely right when he complained
that many of his critics “have seen in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity
for them to defend Zionism, support Israel and launch attacks on
Palestinian nationalism.”[1]On the other side, there is a converse lack
of enthusiasm for talking about the Jews among students of orientalism.This, too, is partly politically motivated.

Said himself well recognized,
as would anyone familiar with the facts, that Jews as well as Muslims had been
the target of orientalism; indeed, he called orientalism the “Islamic branch”
of anti-Semitism.[2]Focusing on Jews as targets rather than
perpetrators of orientalism, however, decreases (in rhetorical terms though
certainly not in logical ones) the effectiveness of the argument for Zionism as
a form of anti-Arab orientalism.It is,
therefore, perhaps understandable if writers primarily concerned with a
critique of Zionism overlook other aspects of the relationship between
orientalism and the Jews.They generally
see Zionism as an example of orientalist ideology in the service of western
colonialism, and consequently link the creation of Israel to the West’s imperial
expansion in the Orient.In Said’s own
opus, his essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” set the tone for
this type of argument.[3]It has also been popular with Israeli
scholars of the “post-Zionist” school, such as Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pappé,
Gershon Shafir, and Ronen Shamir.

As Derek J. Penslar has argued
elsewhere, the link between Zionism and colonialism is undeniable.On the other hand, there is more to Zionism
than that: it has also been one of an oppressed people’s response to racist
discrimination, and the discrimination has often been expressed in orientalist
terms.[4]Martin Kramer has argued that nineteenth
century European Jews questioned the East-West dichotomy because it excluded
them, as “Easterners,” from the national polity.[5]Much in the attitudes to Islam of such
nineteenth-century Jewish thinkers as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and
Ignaz Goldziher appears, according to John Efron’s article in this volume, to
support Kramer’s point, though Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s article points to what he
sees as its limitations.

Whatever the merits of Kramer’s
case may be, there can be no doubt that in the nineteenth century the Jews were
much more importantly the targets rather than the perpetrators of orientalism.To reconcile this fact with Said’s emphasis
on orientalism as a colonialist ideology, some authors, most notably Susannah
Heschel and Jonathan Hess, have produced interesting work that explains the
parallels between imperialist and anti-Jewish orientalism on the premise that
European Jews were a kind of colonized population, subject to quasi-colonial
domination by the Gentiles.

Hess provides some concrete
support for the “Jews-as-colonials” argument.The German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) was an
orientalist and an anti-Jewish polemicist.Hess notes that Michaelis came up with a colonialist solution to the
“problem” of the Jews as the Asiatic residents of Europe.He suggested turning Europe’s
Jews into real colonials – by exporting them to “sugar islands” in the West Indies, where they would labor to benefit the German
economy.

Hess’ work, while demonstrating
the value of the colonialist paradigm, also shows up its limits.As anyone examining the sources must realize,
orientalist depiction of the Jews was common in the late eighteenth century and
indeed, as several articles in this volume demonstrate, much before.Michaelis’ proposed deportation of the Jews
to the Caribbean was a quirk: clearly it did
not motivate more than a small part of the debate on Jews as orientals, a
debate that was, moreover, common all over Europe
and to a lesser extent America,
and not just Germany.Hess posits that in eighteenth-century Germany there
were two, “parallel orientalisms,” one dealing with the Jews and the other with
the Muslims.Though these parallel lines
meet in Michaelis’ idiosyncratic “sugar islands” suggestion, the broader
question of what they had in common is not answered.It is unlikely that orientalist discourses
with identical features – excluding their object as Other, presenting it as
either eternally unchanging or as degenerate, feminizing it, and so on – could
have developed in the West regarding the Muslims and the Jews in parallel,
unconnected ways.As Bryan Turner put
it, there have been “two related discourses for Semites” – one about the Jews,
the other about Muslims and Arabs.[6]But what is the link between them?

While studies of orientalism
and the Jews on a more-or-less Saidian pattern – whether looking at Zionism as
orientalism or at the history of antisemitism as colonialism – can be of
crucial importance to our understanding of specific issues such as were
investigated by the authors mentioned above, the full depth and breadth of the
connection between orientalism and the Jews reaches well beyond the limits of
the Saidian paradigm, especially as it has been developed in the last two
decades or so.

In this respect, the
assumption that orientalism can be entirely subsumed as a specific instance
under the general topic of colonial discourse has been a hindrance, much as it
has in other ways advanced our understanding of the power politics underlying
orientalism as a major western ideological complex.

Many writers have defined
orientalism not by its formal content as a set of western representations of
the Orient, but in functionalist terms as “a discourse of western
domination.”The tendency has been to
minimize differences and maximize similarities and historical connections
between examples of western domination over various parts of the world.To some authors, indeed, any discourse of
Otherness that is associated with domination merits the label of
orientalism.Ernest J. Wilson III, for
example, writes of African-Americans as targets of America’s “internal orientalism.”[7]A more complex example is Ella Shohat’s
position, according to which American colonial discourse was “constituted by”
orientalism and “the colonial discourse of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East and South Asia
generated a specific form of orientalist discourse directed at North Africa and West Asia
during the later part of the imperial era.”[8]There is, then, a broader orientalism that
does not (yet) have much to do with the Orient, and a more specific orientalism
that does.Both are western discourses
of domination, constructing an Other that will be, or is already, ruled by the
West.

This broadening of Said’s Orientalism to the study of
colonialism in general as a discursive phenomenon has already proven to be
among the most important achievements of scholarship at the turn of the
twenty-first century.Many of the
scholars furthering this line of inquiry (though sometimes in ways quite
contrary to Said’s) themselves have non-western, “colonial” antecedents and are
writing from a postcolonial position as residents either of the former colonies
or of their diasporas in the West.Some,
like Lila Abu-Lughod or Talal Asad stem, like Said did, from the Arab world,
but most are South Asian:Aijaz Ahmad,
Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak,
Gauri Viswanathan, and others.This may
be a minor reason why they have shied away from the term “orientalism,”
generally preferring to focus on local Indian conditions in the context of
global influences, with potential comparisons made to not only the hub of
Said’s Orient – Islamic North Africa and West Asia – but any other part of the
Third World and even the Third World diaspora in the West.However, the major reason for orientalism
having in many ways evolved into an avatar of “postcolonial studies” is given
by the very nature of the project of subsuming orientalism under the rubric of
imperialism.Said and others have shown
impressively how orientalism as a discourse functioned within the building of
western empires.But if there is
nothing other to
orientalism than that and orientalism is seen as merely a special case of
imperial domination, then why maintain a separate topic of research labeled
“orientalism” at all?Indeed in the last
decades of his life Said himself preferred to focus on imperialism and
colonialism rather than orientalism per se.

Colonialism and imperialism,
however, are relevant only since the late eighteenth century; yet both
orientalism and its Jewish connection are much older, as the articles by
Akbari, Kalmar,
and to some extent Parfitt and Zhou demonstrate.And even then the Jewish connection to
colonialism and orientalism needs to be complicated.

Jews responded to the
anti-Jewish orientalism of the late eighteenth to early twentieth century in
three different ways (typical, we believe, for other targets of orientalism,
including Muslims, as well): first, by rejecting it wholesale; second, by
idealizing and romanticizing the Orient and themselves as its representatives;
and third, by setting up traditional Jews as oriental, in contrast to
modernized Jewry which was described as “western.”

The wholesale rejection of an
oriental identity for the Jews was common among segments of both liberal and
orthodox Jewry in Europe; it does not
particularly concern us here.A more
nuanced rejection, among right-wing Zionists who opted for an Italian-centered,
Mediterranean identity for the Jewish state, is however explored in the
fascinating article on this little-known topic by Eran
Kaplan.

The romantic self-image of a
noble oriental Jew can in part be seen in Abraham Geiger as explored by
Susannah Heschel[9] and in
this volume by John Efron.Efron’s portrayal of Heinrich Graetz and
Ignaz Goldziher fill in more of the picture, as does Michael Berkowitz’s study
of the enigmatic Dutch-Jewish-Hebrew poet, Jakob de Haan.Outside this volume the reader might want to
consult Ivan Davidson Kalmar’s study
of the “Moorish-style” synagogue, a building style that encodes modernizing
Jewry’s romantic image of the medieval world of Islam.[10]Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany also includes material that may be relevant.[11]

The “internal orientalism” of
Jew versus Jew, practiced by modernizing, western or westernized, Ashkenazic
Jews vis-à-vis their more traditional brethren was not unrelated to the
romantic self-orientalization just mentioned.Ismar Schorsch and others have shown that the identification of
nineteenth century liberal Jewry with Judaism in medieval Muslim Spain was in
important measure a way to avoid the stigma of identifying with the Ostjuden
of Eastern Europe.[12]For the most part the “half-Asiatic” Ostjuden
were abhorred in, paradoxically, typically orientalist terms; yet they,
too, could be the target of romantic orientalism.Of more relevance to recent history is
another version of Jew-towards-Jew orientalism: that of the Ashkenazic Jews
(originating in the West) towards the “oriental” Jews in Israel.A considerable part of this volume is dedicated
to deepening our understanding of this “internal” orientalism of the “western”
Jews verses the East European and the MizrahiJew.Noah
Isenberg’s study of Arnold Zweig’s work expands in important
ways on the theme of the Ostjudeas
in some romantic sense oriental, a subject that had previously received
attention from Paul Mendes-Flohr, Daniel Schroeter, Steven Aschheim and David
Biale and other scholars.As for the
Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relationship, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
surveys the work of Ella Shohat and others who draw parallels between
orientalism directed towards Jews by Christians and orientalism directed
towards Mizrahim by Ashkenazim.

Clearly, romantic Jewish counter-orientalism
as well as internal Jewish orientalism towards “Eastern” Jews of one kind or
another has something to do with the colonial context of orientalism.Equally clearly, the colonial context is not
the issue that is central to it.

If the transition from
orientalism to postcolonialism has left important elements of our topic of
“Orientalism and the Jews” by the side, the same is true of another (and
related) switch from Said’s original reading of orientalism as positing a rigid
structural opposition between East and West, to a new recognition that here as
elsewhere boundaries are flexible and permeable.Recent work has focused in Turnerian fashion
on the “liminal” region between Occident and Orient as a most productive source
of orientalist discourse (and performance) and the counter-discourses it
generates.Homi Bhabha has been perhaps
the most effective proponent of the thesis that postcolonial populations (both
“at home” and in the diaspora) have been defining themselves largely in
response to western influence and domination.The result are “hybrid” discourses of identity, and these may reflect
local social and cultural patterns rather than any traditions that the
occidental observer may deem “oriental.”[13]

It is perhaps surprising that
scholars concerned with postcolonial “hybridity” have paid so little attention
to the Jews (and vice versa).Indeed, in
this volume Sander Gilman argues that for the “multicultural” writers that are
so much the focus of much of postcolonial literary studies, the Jews seem to be
the eternal exception, a people who, far from hybrid, have an essence that is
both unchanging and contrastingly distinctive (as do, in the orientalist
conception, all orientals).

Yet if ever there was a
population that lives at the borders between cultures and civilizations it is
the Jews.[14]More than that, we suspect that, at some
level, the liminal region between Arab/Muslim, Jew, and Christian – what
Jacques Derrida and others have called “the Abrahamic”[15]
– must be quite central not only to any understanding of the Jewish aspects of
orientalism, but of orientalism tout
court.Derrida speaks of “the fold [pli] of this Abrahamic or
Ibrahimic moment, folded over and again [replié] by the Gospels between the two other “religions of
the Book.”[16]This volume’s essays by Akbari and Kalmar show how from
medieval times Jews and Muslims constituted a silent referent for one another
in western texts and art.Other authors,
as we have said, explore how in Israel today this “explosive” mixture of the
Jewish and the Arab is the stuff of relations between the dominant Ashkenazi
elite and the Mizrahim who (like Derrida himself) combine Jewish
identity with roots in the Arab world.In Derridean terms, the Jew and the Arab are always “traces” of the
other when only one of the pair is addressed.Touching on both simultaneously causes an “explosive” and therefore
always scattered, diffuse, and never completely decipherable eruption of the
“unspeakable” into representation.

For the reasons listed above,
although both the colonial/postcolonial and the related “hybridity” paradigm of
research on orientalism stand to profit from incorporating the relationship
between Jews and orientalism, the current volume is emphatically not meant to
be primarily a response to the existing literature on orientalism and
postcolonialism.Apart from the fact
that we considered it preferable at this stage to establish the breadth of the
issue without prior theoretical, political, and other restrictions, we
recognize, too, that the existing paradigms may have to be broadened to do
justice to the historical facts.

One way is to pay more serious
attention to the role of religion as one of the primary referents of
orientalist discourse.It is the
Christian religious tradition that forms the missing link explaining the
necessary, rather than accidental, connection in orientalism between
representations of Muslims and representations of Jews.

Clearly, discourses about the
Islamic world were what most interested Said in Orientalism, and “Muslimism” might have been a more correct,
if also more awkward, term for his subject matter.Yet the fact that the oriental Other Said’s
book deals with was for the most part an Islamic Other seems to get much less play than would seem to
be merited by the facts.This is merely
one side of the coin, for this under-representation of Islam is the consequence
of Said’s under-representation of Christianity as a major, and perhaps
historically the principal, factor in orientalism.True, Said realized that “present-day
Orientalism” was a “set of structures inherited from the past, secularized,
redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were
naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian
supernaturalism.”[17]But Said was content to leave the
implications of this aperçu
more or less unexplored:he no more than
touches, for example, on the missionarizing rhetoric of imperialism, and
minimizes the personal involvement of missionaries along with colonialists and
imperialists.Was he as a Christian protecting his religion
from the charge of complicity in orientalism?Or was he just, as a secular thinker, underestimating the deep power of
religion over discourse both in the East and in the West?The answer matters little.The importance of recognizing the Christian
foundations of orientalism is an intellectual necessity, dictated by the facts
rather than by elements of any scholar’s personality.

Recognizing how important
Christianity has been to orientalism might actually have helped Said to justify
a decision that otherwise appears rather problematic – excluding the Far East from the focus of his analyses.Among the good reasons for the exclusion
would be that the dominant religions of China or Japan do not share the Judaic roots
of Christianity and Islam.Consequently
their ideological “otherness” was of a very different nature from that of the
Muslim world – or the Jews.Western
discourses about the Far East are not part of
“the Abrahamic.”Western discourses
about the Jews are.

In this volume the Christian
foundations and enduring Christian undertones of orientalism become clear in
the contributions by Akbari, Parfitt, Zhou, Kalmar, and Raz-Krakotzkin.To fill in the picture the reader unfamiliar
with the issue should also consult James Pasto’s remarkable investigation of
the roots of modern orientalism in German biblical criticism in the context of
the “Jewish Question” in Europe[18]
as well as the above-mentioned body of work by Jacques Derrida and Gil Anidjar
on the “Abrahamic.”[19]Indeed, to those on whatever side of the
political or intellectual spectrum who object to linking Jews to orientalism we
can do no better than give them Gil Anidjar’s advice:“Read the incomparable, Shylock and Othello.”[20]To understand orientalism, we must read
discourses about Muslims and Jews together, however embarrassing or disturbing
the task may be politically, religiously or emotionally.

This is not to say that
orientalism was the same regardless of whether it dealt with the Orient itself
or with the “Orientals of Europe.”

The exact nature of the
relationship between orientalist images of Jews and Muslims has undergone, like
orientalism itself, substantial historical variation.One has to guard against positing eternal
semiotic systems that survive regardless of the social and political
context.Although Said professed to be a
follower of Foucault, his account of orientalism diverged radically from the
historiographic habits of his professed master.Foucault, who focused on radical discontinuities in history, would not
have subscribed to Said’s view of orientalism as spanning antiquity, the Middle
Ages, modernity, and beyond.Indeed, his
essentialist and idealistic conception of a timeless orientalism permanently
inherent in some sort of a “Western mind” has been accused of preventing Said
from formulating an effective anti-imperialist position.[21]

Orientalism itself can be
regarded as a form into which various content can be cast.We will suggest below a periodization of
orientalism in general and of its relationship to representations of the Jews,
rooted in continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Western
world.In this sense it is more like what
Foucault called “language” (a finite set of principles that can generate an
infinite number of discourses), rather than “discourse,” a word that Foucault
used to refer to a finite corpus of historically located texts.[22](We will, however, continue to follow Said’s
lead in referring to orientalism as a “discourse” - meaning “ways of
representing” the Orient – as this has now become a common practice.)Looking at orientalism as language rather
than discourse would open it up to theorizing in terms of the Bakhtinian notion
of slovo.According to Mikhail Bakhtin, slovo, a Russian term quite
homologous with the French parole
and typically translated as “the word,” is a stage on which changing and
competing, socially conditioned views are played out.[23]And indeed, orientalism has, like words, kept
a continuity of form while recharging itself periodically with new
content.

New ideas require new language
at times, but more often they take hold more easily if clad in familiar
forms.New content infuses old form, and
the earlier content does not quite disappear but leaves traces that are
recognizable in the new.For example,
when imperialism became the new content of orientalism the old Christian
content continued to structure its form.Indeed, imperialist rhetoric continued to be accompanied by Christian
rhetoric, and the talk of waking up the dormant East through Western
intervention was often accompanied by the proselytizing discourse of missionary
societies eager to bring true religion to the ignorant oriental Muslims and
Jews.

A Periodization

We suggest a periodization of
orientalism that recognizes its changing content as consonant with changes in
the geopolitical and economic relations between East and West as well as
between Christians, Muslims and Jews.

The periods we distinguish
are:1) the Saracen period from the rise of Islam until the end of the
fourteenth century, when comparisons between Muslims and Jews were founded on
religious grounds with no necessary geographic correlation, and the Islamic
enemy was referred to generically as the “Saracen;” 2) the Turkish period from the late
fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, when the prototypical Muslim in
the Western imagination was a “Turk;” 3) the Arab period from the late eighteenth century until the
1960’s, when the “Turk’s” place as the stereotype of the oriental was replaced
by the Arab and specifically the Bedouin, orientalism was characterized by both
romantic notions and progressively more openly racist vituperations, and both
secular antisemitism and Zionism were organized as social and political
movements; and 4) the postcolonial
period when discourse about Muslims becomes primarily political and only Jews
with roots in the Arab world continue, though most of them now live in Israel
and the Western world, to be called “oriental” (Mizrahi).These
periods overlap greatly.They also show
considerable internal development.All
relate to the changing sociopolitical and economic realities of the
relationship between the Christian West and the Muslim East, as well as (to a
lesser extent until the most recent periods) Christian relations with the Jews.

Proto-Orientalism:The Saracen Period

In the proto-orientalist
imagination of the early Middle Ages, the Jew was imagined in terms of the
oriental location of the Holy Land before the
Muslim.The “East” was at the time
constructed mythologically and theologically rather than ethnographically.It was the site of sacred biblical history,
and also of apocalyptic events heralding the Second Coming and the Last
Judgment.To the extent that Western
Christians had a clear vision of the contemporary Orient, they imagined it as
the locus of the Roman Empire of the East, the
Christian realm that had a precarious hold on the sites of Christian history,
including at times the Holy Land.To the East beyond these sites, which Western
Crusaders succeeded in holding from time to time, were alien peoples inhabiting
murky magical lands.The legend of
Prester John, the hero who was to come from far away East to revitalize
Christian faith, illustrates the belief that theOrient continued, even after the death of
Christ, to be imbued with a holiness that was capable of recharging a
spiritually lax Christendom to its West (it also highlights the fact that the
Christian presence in the Orient was part of western Christendom’s image of the
East).This eschatological Orient had
everything to do with the fact that it was thought to have witnessed the events
of the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus, the “King of the Jews.”

True, from almost the beginning
of Islam in the seventh century, Jerusalem
and the biblical lands came under Muslim control.But this did not immediately define the image
of the Orient as Muslim.For one thing, Constantinople rather than Jerusalem was the major city of the Orient in
the Western mind, and it remained in Christian hands until 1453.For another, even under Muslim rule there was
a substantial Christian presence in the Holy Land,
which the Crusaders attempted to use as a tool for the establishment of
political domination.They were seldom
very successful (with the “LatinKingdom,” 1099-1187, the
most notable exception) but they won enough skirmishes to make the idea of a
Christian-ruled Palestine
appear feasible to reasonable Christians until as late as the 14th
century.

Although the Crusaders were
fighting for a “real” land and their decline has typically been blamed on
venality (they plundered Christian Constantinople) and carnal sin (many died of
sexually transmitted diseases) they conceptualized their fight in biblical-historical
rather than geopolitical terms.Akbari
shows how some medieval tales of the Siege
of Jerusalem conflate conquest by the Crusaders with conquest by the
Romans, equating in complex ways the Christians with the Romans on one hand,
and the Jews with the Muslims on the other.There was in these accounts, however, no indication that the Other under
siege, be it Jew or Muslim, was thought of as oriental, that what was under
siege was the Orient.The “Saracen”
forces were at least as firmly established (and more menacing) in the southern
and southwestern than in the eastern Mediterranean.“Imaginative geography,” as Said called it,
did not yet write off the Orient to Islam.

With Christians in Anatolia and Muslims in Iberia, Islam was not yet imagined,
either geographically or metaphorically, as completely outside the Western
world.The “impostor” Muhammad was not
thought of as an outsider with no connection to Christianity but rather as a
kind of schismatic who challenged, and therefore articulated with, the Church
tradition.In Dante’s Inferno Muhammad is “split,”
“ripped open from chin to where we fart.”A savage split also marks the face of Muhammad’s lieutenant, Ali:his face is “cleft from his chin up to the
crown.”[24]Clearly we are being shown here two of the
many sinners punished for schism, for splitting apart the church – and not as
Said incongruously suggests, with Islam as the “epitome of an outsider against
which the whole of European civilization from the Middle Ages on was founded.”[25]Dante makes the point quite explicitly:

The souls that you see passing in this ditch

were all sowers of scandal and schism in life,

and so in death you see them torn asunder.

The ditch contained more than a
hundred sinners, and apart from Muhammad and Ali they appear to all have been
not Muslims (or Jews or pagans) but bad Christians. Muhammad and Ali are
represented here as schismatics, not infidels, and certainly not as outsiders
to European civilization.

The Turkish Period

The imagined equation between
the Orient and Islam appears only near the end of the 14th
century.The “Saracens” were then all
but expelled from Iberia
and gone from Sicily.At the same time, a new Islamic power was
dislodging Christians in the East.The
Ottomans (referred to as “Turks” although they successfully assimilated members
of many other ethnic groups) conquered parts of Southeast
Europe.When they conquered
Constantinople in 1453 and made it their
capital, they ended forever the long history of the Eastern (a.k.a. “Oriental”)
Roman Empire.The conquest also put an end to any half-realistic plans for a Christian
conquest of Jerusalem.

In the spirit of Renaissance
humanism, the Ottoman ascendancy was interpreted in Christian Europe in secular
terms.Unlike in the preceding periods,
events in the Orient as elsewhere could now be painted with the hues of human
conflict rather than of the apocalyptic imagination.Indeed the Muslim advance may actually have
been not only the object, but also in large measure a cause of this overall
secularization of history, which was part of “the primary event of modernity;
the affirmation of the powers of this
world, the discovery of the plane of immanence.”[26]For if history was entirely governed by God
alone then how could one explain the enormous conquests of the Islamic
foe?

The emphasis on the secular
aspects of the Muslim conquest led to a need to imagine the conquerors in
relatively solid ethnographic terms, rather than as incarnations of apocalyptic
personages.Kalmar shows how Renaissance artists began to
depict biblical Israelites as similar to “Turks,” carefully constructing
details of their attire on the basis of what was known of Ottoman custom.

A geographically continuous
region under the firmly entrenched control of Islam, inhabited by people whose
customs as well as religion were understood as distinctive from those of the
Christian West - these were the necessary if not sufficient conditions for the
rise of orientalism.The Orient became
orientalized.

Ottoman military and, many
would say, cultural supremacy continued into the seventeenth century, with Europe weakened by the continuing Wars of Religion.However, in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia put
an end to the latter, and in 1683 the failure of the Ottoman siege of Vienna ended the
invincibility of the Ottomans.The
representation of orientals as primarily “Turks” continued, but its nature
changed, reflecting the new balance of power between Islam and Christendom.Orientalism remained a discourse deeply imbued
with Christian concerns, and one that typically continued to construct the
oriental as the enemy Other whom one struggled with and whom one, now, could
hope to dominate.Yet with the threat of
the “Turk” largely gone, orientalist discourse could now be freed of some of
the fear and loathing and, indeed, provided some fuel for the new spirit of
Enlightenment universalism and deism.These ideologies, critical of the political domination of the Church,
not seldom presented elements of Islam and Judaism as desirable alternatives to
a reactionary, dogmatic Christianity.In
other words, in addition to its proto-imperialist uses orientalism was also a
vehicle for ideas with which to challenge the hegemony of dogmatic
Christianity, and even of the sociopolitical order in general.

One example that is
particularly relevant to orientalism as it concerned the Jews was
Freemasonry.Masonic notions of oriental
religion were used to challenge the established Christian traditions.The esoteric, often quasi-kabalistic
interpretations of the Bible by the Masons allowed some of them to be open to
Jewish membership in their lodges.It is
true that the German (as opposed to English and French) Masonic authorities
often denied admission to Jews, but German Jews bypassed the restriction by
entering lodges licensed, in Germany, by the Grand Orient of Paris.According to Jacob Katz, in Frankfurt
in the early nineteenth century “the members of the FrankfurtMorgenröthe lodge were
identical with the leaders of the Jewish community.”[27]The contact between Freemasonry and the lay
Jewish community, and even some rabbis such as Gotthold Solomon in Hamburg or
Samuel Hirsch in Luxemburg (an important philosopher and radical reformer)
probably left lasting and as yet insufficiently explored marks on the history
of modern liberal Judaism.

One of the many fascinating
episodes studied by Katz was that of the “Asiatic Brethren,” Die Brüder St. Johannes des Evangelisten aus Asien in
Europa, an idiosyncratic Masonic lodge in Vienna.The great majority were gentiles of the most respectable sort."Ben-Jakhin",
also known as "Abraham" and "Israel", for example, was the
chosen Hebrew name of one of the more enthusiastic aristocrats among the Brethren,
Count Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhofen.Eventually, the Order was to count quite a few of the high nobility
among its ranks, including Prince Karl of Hesse, the Landgrave of Schleswig.The notorious adventurer, Moses
Dobruška, alias Franz Thomas von Schönfeld, a baptized Court Jew, was a sort of
spiritual leader to the Brethren.It was
he, apparently, who supplied a Gentile brother with a forgery in Hebrew and
passed it off as a secret document found in the Holy Land.He seems, too, to have convinced the lodge
members to adopt Hebrew names in place of the Arabic pseudonyms they had
favored.[28]

The incident illustrates the
potential of Masonic ideology to support a notion of Jewishness as a sort of
patent of nobility, certifying descent from the ancient Israelites who created
the spiritual heritage of the West.The
image of a “noble Jew,” cast in orientalist terms, was particularly common in Germany – where
the modernizing Jewish community eagerly adopted it.In Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" Saladin,
the famous nemesis of Richard the Lionhearted, is a generous and wise but
financially not quite solvent sultan.He
asks a Jewish merchant, Nathan, to lend him money.Nathan, an oriental notable whose camels ply
the deserts from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, agrees.But Saladin learns to value Nathan's wisdom even more than his
cash.For it turns out that Nathan is a
deist who makes a convincing argument for the proposition that all religions
are equally close to the possession of Truth.

The “noble Jew” was not an
anomaly in European fiction at the time.Charlene A. Lea has counted more than fifty German-language plays
featuring an idealized wise Jew in Germany alone, between 1750 and
1805.[29]It was part of a pro-Jewish movement among
the Gentiles, who wished to demonstrate the nobility of the Jewish spiritual
heritage. On the Jewish side, it was seized upon by a desire to proclaim the
Jews as a “race” or “nation” of great antiquity, ennobled by its association
with the Bible, but also more generally with the Orient as the source of
spiritual inspiration for the West.

The effort for
self-representation as a noble people was, among Jews, part of the broader
process that Hannah Arendt described in the following terms:

[T]o transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from
which choice exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen, was one of the
many “ideas” produced by frustrated liberal intellectuals in their dreams of
replacing the old governing classes by a new `elite’ through non-political
means… [It was] as significant for English as it was for German race-thinking
that it originated among middle-class writers and not the nobility, that it was
born of the desire to extend the benefits of noble standards to all classes.[30]

This development should be
viewed in the context of a bourgeois society that placed great value on all
signs of noble descent – at the dinner table where they received high-born
guests the successful bourgeois would serve pedigreed wines and talk of noble
races of horses or dogs.The late
eighteenth century marked the origin of all sorts of connoisseurship associated
with breeding animals or plants, and the craze continued in the nineteenth
century.Darwin wrote that his ideas came from
breeding pigeons; Mendel’s genetic discoveries were suggested to him by his
hobby of crossing different strands of African violets.

As ladies and gentlemen bred
animals and improved plants, they practiced on their surroundings the doctrine
of race as nobility.The Jews among them
felt that their race, the Chosen People who brought knowledge of God to the
world, was perhaps the noblest of them all.(Besides, for the increasing number of Jewish apostates, deists,
agnostics, and atheists, a racial understanding of Jewishness helped to give
positive content to the fact that they were still universally regarded as
Jews.)Noting the trend, Goethe is said
to have joked that the “Jews claim descent from Adam and Eve.The rest of us, however, have other ancestors
as well.”

Popular “race thinking” went
hand in hand with scientific efforts to classify races of humans (an effort
that was related to the advances in animal and plant classification which
themselves probably owed something to the concept of race).When in 1781 the theologically trained
historian August Ludwig von Schlözer invented the term “Semitic” he applied it
primarily to a language family, but his choice of term betrayed the mixture of
Christianity, science and evolving “race thinking” characteristic of the time.In Schlözer’s mind the languages he was
referring to were all spoken by races descended from the biblical character
Shem (Gen. x – xi).The category
“Semitic” thus gave support to the truth of the Bible at the same time as it
conflated (and confused) relations of language and race in a fashion that was
thoroughly in accord with the latest scientific advances of the period.

Likewise when Franz Bopp
published, in 1816, his Conjugation
System of Sanskrit in Comparison with Greek, Latin, Persian and German, the
Indo-European linguistic connection was immediately contrasted with the Semitic
family.The Indo-European or “Aryan”
peoples were imagined as holding sway from the Germanic inhabitants of the British Isles to the light-skinned invaders of India, who had
set up their rule there over the dark-skinned Dravidian natives.The Other that defined the limits of this
Indo-European race was primarily the Semite.

In this way, orientalism was
recast in a racial mold.The Christian
West was the domain of the Indo-European races, while the Semitic “Arabians”
inhabited the Muslim Orient.The Jews,
the Asiatics of Europe, straddled both worlds but were understood by everyone
to stem from “oriental stock.”

The Arab Period

The idea of a Semitic Orient
could only develop when Ottoman power was no longer supreme in the Arab
world.The Turkish language is not
Semitic, so it followed from the racial-linguistic assumptions of the time that
the Turks were a different race from the Semitic-speaking Arabs and Jews.But with Ottoman power beginning to fade it
was the Arab character of much of the Orient, and of the Islamic religion, that
took hold of the Western imagination.

From the early nineteenth
century Western art, fiction, and scholarship was replacing the Turks with the
Arabs as the “typical” living orientals (the ancient Egyptians were also in
vogue as the principal dead ones).William Beckford’s Vathek,
conte arabe (1787), featured an Arab ruler even if his court had
many of the trappings of the “oriental despot” traditionally associated with
the Ottoman sultan.The Arab identity of
the protagonists is much clearer, and more important, in Mejnoun and Leila, the Arabian Petrarch and
Laura by Isaac D’Israeli (Benjamin Disraeli’s father), published in
1797.And while Ingres’ Grande Odalisque of 1814 was
probably meant to evoke a harem in Constantinople (like his Turkish Bath), Delacroix
translated the orientalist idiom into an Arab context in his North African
paintings, and most famously in the Women
of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), with its narguileh-smoking
harem inmates who are, incidentally, widely believed to represent Delacroix’s
Jewish Algerian models.

The continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire was probably not the only reason for the
Semitic Arabs replacing the Turks as Europe’s
chief oriental interest.Preoccupation
with the European Semites may have been another.There can be no doubt that the Semitic race
was of concern to many western people mainly because they were interested in
either the Jews of the Bible or the Jews of their own time, rather than the
Arabs.At the time the place of the Jews
in Europe was hotly debated by both themselves
and their friends and enemies.Identifying the Jews as Semites gave a scientific sheen to the
discussion.This was especially so in
the beginning and the middle of the century, when colonial expansion was still
in its infancy.

In this period Jews were little
troubled by being labeled as Semitic.It
is true, as the example of Michaelis shows, that their ascribed oriental
identity meant to some of their enemies, already, that they had no place in a
modern Europe.Yet the prevalence of deist romanticizations of the Orient and of the
“noble Jew” stereotype meant that being of oriental race was not necessarily a
source of shame.In this volume John
Efron shows how, against this backdrop, important nineteenth century Jewish
thinkers posited links between Judaism and Islam.Far from aiming to denigrate Islam, Efron
argues, they assumed a close, even familial, relationship between the two
religions.Islam was steeped in Jewish
influences, and the Islamic world provided medieval Jewry with it most secure
and intellectually stimulating environment.Moreover, according to these authors, Islam and Judaism were philosophically
and theologically superior to Christianity.

Outside academic scholarship,
it was perhaps Benjamin Disraeli, the leading Tory statesman and Prime Minister
under Queen Victoria,
who most explicitly expressed his Semitic pride.He was the son of Isaac D’Israeli, whose
orientalist novel we have just mentioned.Disraeli's view of the Jews was that the Jews were an "Arabian
tribe," and the Arabs, "only Jews upon horseback." Together,
Arab and Jew are depicted as a favored race destined to receive divine
revelation. When a character in Tancred
(published in 1844) says, with the author's obvious approval, that "God
never spoke except to an Arab," he means of course that Moses, the
Prophets of Israel, Jesus, and Mohammed were all Arabs. Disraeli fancied himself
a descendant of what, certainly in God's mind, was the world's best stock.A decade before the publication of the Comte
de Gobineau's Essay on the
Inequality of Racesthe hero
of Tancred declared that
“race is all.”Such sentiments were
anything but rare among the Jews.In
1862 Moses Hess, Marx’s collaborator on the Neue rhenische Zeitung, stood his colleague’s teachings on
their head and claimed that “the race struggle is primary; the class struggle
is secondary.”[31]The proud Moorish-style synagogues explored
elsewhere by Ivan Davidson Kalmar did not, as is sometimes thought, encode a
romanticization of Sephardic Spain
as much as a racial identification with the “Arabian” Orient – the “tremendous
claim of noble birth,” as Isaiah Berlin
termed Disraeli’s self-orientalizing fantasies.[32]

There were early indications
that Semitic pride among the Jews would backfire and become an additional
target of antisemitism.But things only
came to a head towards the end of the century.In the seventies a severe economic depression was followed by ever
louder complaints against the alleged Jewish domination of the economy, of some
of the liberal professions, and of culture.In Germany
and France
the grumbling took on a political form as movements and genuine parties with
parliamentary ambitions were formed.It
was during this period that the term “antisemite” came to be used, probably to
give Jew-bating a pseudoscientific character, since the term “Semite” was part
of the vocabulary of linguistic and orientalist scholarship.The antisemites often supported their
arguments for excluding the Jews from positions of influence by pointing, as
Michaelis had done, to their alien, oriental and therefore non-European
character.Sometimes they referred to
Semitic pride among the Jews themselves as evidence substantiating their
accusations.

It is well known that the new
antisemitism rose in the Western world at the same time as the scramble for
overseas possessions that extended the Great Powers’ control or influence to reach
some four fifths of the globe’s population.It is worth considering if the development of what became known as
“imperialism” (an ideology justifying colonization, and a notion that the
nation depends upon the empire for survival) was in some ways linked with the
growing agitation against Jews.The
answer is complicated.Even Hannah
Arendt, who included Antisemitism
and Imperialism among
the three sections of her Origins
of Totalitarianism, failed to articulate a cogent explanation of how
antisemitism and imperialism related to each other (as opposed to how each
related to totalitarianism).Yet such an
explanation will be indispensable to the full understanding of the connection
between orientalism and the Jews.Here
we can do no more than attempt a brief discussion of the lines along which an
inquiry into the question might proceed.

Parker Thomas Moon’s Imperialism and World Politics,
published in 1926, was in its time the standard American text on the
subject.It recognized that
“Imperialism, nay, all history, is made by the dynamic alliance of interests
and ideas.”[33]At the nexus of imperialism, orientalism, and
Jewish history it is simpler to identify the “ideas” than the “interests.”
Ideologically, both the Western quest to control foreign lands and the move to
exclude Jews from Western society were grounded in the ideology of race.Whatever else one might say about them,
imperialist and antisemitic ideologies are all unquestionably examples of
racist thought.

Where the “interests” rather
than the “ideas” behind imperialism are concerned, scholarship offers a
proliferation of rather different approaches.They may be divided, for the most part, into those that emphasize the
economy and those that emphasize politics.

Of the economic approaches the
Marxist ones are particularly noteworthy.It is perhaps relevant that among the Marxist students of imperialism
there were many persons of Jewish origin:Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and others.Imperialism is an attractive subject for a
leftist Jew as it is harder than any other aspect of capitalism to attribute to
Jewish activity.According to most
Marxist as well as many non-Marxist analysts, the classic imperialist economy
imported raw materials and exported finished goods to the colonies.(It was this dependence on foreign
manufactures that was opposed by Gandhi in his swadeshi movement.)The elements of the bourgeoisie who most benefited from the imperial
system were, consequently, exporters of manufactured goods, importers of raw
materials, owners of plantations and mines overseas and, finally, the
financiers who provided the funds and the traders who mediated between
producers and consumers.Jews did not
figure prominently among these lynchpins of imperialism.

For various reasons, Jewish
participation in manufacturing indexed the backwardness of a West or Central
European capitalist economy and, relatedly, its relative lack of involvement in
empire building.Jewish manufacturers
were extremely important in Hungary,
less so in Germany,
and marginal in England
and France.[34]On the raw materials side, the owners of
plantations were rarely Jewish.Mine
owners, too, were seldom Jewish, with the exception perhaps of the South
African gold and diamond industry, where Lithuanian Jews, who had traditionally
dominated the once prosperous diamond industry in their country of origin,
found some application.By and large,
however, if Jewish groups benefited from imperialism it was less from producing
goods that needed to be exported or mining raw materials to be imported, than
from associated opportunities in finance and trade.Given their presence in finance and trade in
general, however, there is nothing to indicate that Jewish firms were
particularly active in the imperial economy.

Nor did the Jews have a very
great presence in government, in spite of the influence from the outside that
was afforded the richest financiers and merchants among them.Demagogues like Edouard Drumont in France whipped
up an unprecedented frenzy of Jew hatred in the wake of the failed French
effort to build a Panama Canal in the eighteen
eighties, which wrecked the savings of thousands of small investors.None of the big players were Jews, but some
of the middlemen who dealt with investors (including corrupt politicians) were,
and that was enough for Drumond and his ilk to lay the whole disaster at the
door of the Jews.This abortive venture,
however, was not a true example of imperialism.Genuine imperialism, as Hannah Arendt argued, began only when the government
was asked to send soldiers to “protect” the insecure ventures and adventures of
speculators.(Indeed, the Panama Canal could only be built once the Americans
literally created a country to serve the project’s interests, by plucking the
surrounding territory out of Colombia
and then leasing the required land from its “independent” government.)

Territorial control, as a
defining feature of imperialism, necessitated not only capital and capitalists
but bigger government
and an enlarged military.The imperial
service, both civil and military, provided employment for the sons of the
privileged at the helm and for the superfluous “masses” at the bottom.Few Jews were found in either group.Throughout the Western world Jewish
participation in the armed forces and the civil service was minimal due to
overt discrimination or covert hostility.Even in France
and Austria-Hungary,
where some Jews were allowed to become officers, Jewish soldiers were often
harassed and, as the Dreyfus Affair shows, suspected of disloyalty.Government bureaucracies were hardly more
generous.Colonial offices and overseas
colonial administrations regarded the Jews with suspicion.The feeling was fully reciprocated.

The marginal status of the Jews
in manufacturing as well as the political and military apparatus meant that
they were, as a group, objectively irrelevant to imperialism.Yet it was during the height of imperialism
that they began to be more than ever reviled for their alleged control over the
economy and the politics of every Western state.Antisemites identified the Jews as a major
noxious force just when their sociopolitical importance was objectively in
decline.

There was, in this, more at
play than in the case of the declining aristocracy who, as Arendt pointed out,
came to be hated once their socioeconomic usefulness was spent.Although the Jews played a small role in the
politics and economics of imperialism, they received extraordinary attention in
its ideology.Imperialist ideology
reformulated Christian evangelism in secular terms.Much of it concerned the purported need to
spread to the rest of the world not only the Gospel but the superior
civilization of the West.And that
civilization was, fatefully for the Jews, understood as the achievement no
longer only of the Christian faith but also of the European “races.”It was not generally believed that the Jewish
“race” was one of them.The relative
absence of the Jews in the imperial enterprise made it easier to argue for excluding
them, along with the “natives” of the colonies, from the benefits of the
“Western” guarantees of liberty and equality, and indeed of residence in the
West.

One consequence of the theories
of an ineluctable racial difference between Semites and Aryans was the belief
that the “Jewish question” could only be solved if the Jews were isolated from
Gentiles either in ghettos or, more radically, expelled from the Western
world.To an antisemite like Adolf
Wahrmund, a professor of oriental studies at the University of Vienna,
the anti-Jewish and the imperial fights were one and the same.Wahrmund advanced a pseudo-anthropological
argument:all Semites, including the
Jews, embodied the nomadic culture of the desert and could only interact with
settled peoples such as the Europeans by robbing and enslaving them.Wahrmund complained that antisemitism lagged
behind imperialism in accomplishing its goals:

In Africa the nomads have been pushed back into the desert from
North and South: the new Congo State and the German colonies mean cutting off
the nomads and Islam from the South, in Central Asia Russia has laid its fist
upon the Touranian nomadic tribes …; even the Turkish nomads of Asia Minor will
soon have their practices stopped by the West; but among us, in the realm of
Christian German statehood, the Semitic-Pharisaic nomad lays down the law.[35]

The Postcolonial Period

Zionism and Imperialism

If Jews were not often involved
in the major imperialist projects of the time, it is also true that western
imperialism defined the geopolitical situation that enabled Zionism to
succeed.In the late nineteenth century
Europeans continued to wage a struggle to fill the power vacuum being left by
the continuous decline of the Ottoman Empire.Britain was concerned with
maintaining a continuous sphere of influence from the Mediterranean
to India.It was threatened by Russian efforts to reach
the Mediterranean.The Germans challenged Britain, too,
with the railway concession they wrung out of Istanbul, linking Berlin with Baghdad and the Persian
Gulf.In addition to the
well-heeled passengers of the Orient Express, this made it possible to
transport freight that would otherwise have to travel via the
British-controlled Suez Canal.Theodor Herzl hoped to make use of German
influence with the Porte, asking the Kaiser’s government to pressure the
Sultan’s, which still controlled Palestine,
to support Jewish settlement there.But
the course of the First World War led Zionists to believe that a victorious Britain would dismantle
the Ottoman Empire and dominate the Holy Land.London became the
preferred address for the Zionists’ efforts.In 1917 the British Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour declared to
Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour
the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In this way the Jewish people
became embroiled in imperialist intrigue, and the Zionist movement became from
both the Western and the Arab point of view an instrument of European
imperialism.Such was the beginning of
the end of the story of the Ashkenazic Jews as a target of orientalism, and was
no doubt what Said had in mind when he suggested that the Jews, unlike the
Arabs, were able to escape the stigma associated with the label, “Semite.”As he put it, “…Western anti-Semitism has
always included both the Jews and Muslims.The latter have yet to be released from that ideological prison …”[36]

Yet Zionism has been more than
just a typical colonial movement; as we have said earlier in many respects it
is itself an anti-colonial liberation movement.Zionism galvanized the energies of portions of modernizing Jewry because
it promised a national rejuvenation and political independence for an oppressed
minority.Its own aims were not
primarily imperial.The early Zionists’
inexcusable disregard for Palestinian rights was a sin of omission rather than
commission.The early Zionists were wont
to describe their movement as aspiring to provide a people without a land with a
land bereft of people.In contrast,
typical colonialists of the era were more than aware of the local foreign
population, and often emigrated precisely to take economic advantage of
non-western labor.

Indeed, the culture of Zionist
and other modernizing Jewish intellectuals closely resembled that of colonial
intelligentsias.Both Jewish and
colonial elites recast their history to speak of past glories that were lost in
part because of the shackles of tradition that destroyed their people’s
potential for technical and scientific progress.Both imagined themselves, too, as emasculated
and feminized, and presented their national movements as capable of instilling
vigorous masculine character into the body politic.

Although the early Zionists
made much of their usefulness to the imperialist state, this rhetoric was
primarily used to convince Jews and Gentiles that Zionism was a rational
project; it was rarely a source ofZionist passion.Subjectively, to
many Zionists the Realpolitik of
alliances with goyim was
never more than a means to realize a radical separation from the Christian
world (even if the physical exit to the Orient was in many ways, as
Raz-Krakotzkin argues, a means of becoming a “normal,” i.e. western-style,
nation).Many Zionists must have felt
something of the passion of the obviously disturbed author of an anonymous
manuscript found among the papers of Aladar Deutsch, a leading Prague rabbi.The writer identified the Zionist movement with a rejuvenation and
“unification” of all Semitic peoples:“The Orient as the old sight of spiritually infused Semitism (Semitentum) will, recognizing the
spiritual emptiness and cowardice of the Aryan so-called culture, force back
the Aryan where he belongs.”[37]

In this expression of rage, the
Jew becomes simultaneously colonized and colonizer, throwing off the yoke of
Gentile domination while assuming a mission
civilisatrice to revivify an allegedly barren land as a means to
regenerating the Jewish people.As
Raz-Krakotzkin’s essay points out, Zionism’s mental horizon, like that of 19th-century
Jewish scholarship in Germany, was the ancient and medieval Middle East, the
incubator of symbiosis between Jewish and Muslim Semites, and not the
contemporary Arab world, which was considered corrupt and degenerate.The Palestinian Arabs were seen not as the
Jews’ biblical cousins, each claiming a divinely-promised patrimony, but rather
as ancient Palestinian Jewry’s devolved descendants, whose preservation of
shards of ancient Hebrew customs and place-names bore witness to the truth of
Zionism’s claim to the land. There is an obvious association between this view
and the classic Christian belief that fossilized Judaic practices bore witness
to the truth of Christianity.Indeed, as
Raz-Krakotzkin argues, the very concept of a Zionist “return to history” was
based in Christian views of time, redemption, and the Jews’ place therein.Thus Zionist claims of affinity with the
Orient were, in fact, steeped in European perspectives and reflexive
projections of Judaic-Orientalist fantasies on to the Palestinian landscape.

During the first half of the past century
those fantasies could, as in Western orientalism in general, assume varying
forms.In Dalia Manor’s piece on Boris
Schatz and Jerusalem’s
BezalelArtAcademy,
the “Orient” is a source of aesthetic inspiration through its naïve
sensuality.In many ways Bezalel
resembled a Pre-Raphaelite workshop, although it also contained elements of the
Victorian work-house in its emphasis on vocational training for the Jewish
poor.A different kind of sensuality, we
learn from Michael Berkowitz’s essay, inflamed the soul of Jakob De Haan, the
poet and sexual adventurer, whose homoerotic passion for Arab youths preceded
and persisted alongside his conversion to ultra-Orthodoxy.This fascinating figure, Nerval in a kaftan,
as it were, orientalized himself in two different ways:the first by moving from Europe
to Palestine,
and the second by adopting the East European Orthodox lifestyle that many
Western Jews routinely conceived as primitive, irrational, and
obscurantist.

Many, but not all: Arnold
Zweig, whose work is explored here by Noah Isenberg, is typical of the group of
German-Jewish intellectuals we have mentioned earlier who, galvanized by
encounters with their Russo-Polish brethren during the first World War,
romanticized the Ostjude
as the soul of Jewish authenticity and the source of Jewish cultural
renewal.For them, Palestine was distant but not outlandish, for
the oriental was already embodied in the Ostjude, and Palestine
represented merely a natural extension of the cultural sphere in which Jewish
renewal was taking place.It is
noteworthy that Martin Buber, who made few actual territorial claims on
Palestine and favored binationalism, expressed little orientalist anxiety about
the traumatic effects of Western settlement in an Eastern land, whereas the
territorially maximalist Vladimir Jabotinsky, we learn from Eran Kaplan’s essay, was in many ways terrified of
the land he sought so desperately to conquer in the name of the Jews.Like Herzl, Jabotinsky associated the Orient
with barbarism.Jabotinsky and other
Revisionist thinkers saw Palestine
not as a ruined garden awaiting restoration but rather as an unredeemable
desert, a physical and psychic challenge to the Western Jewish soul.To reverse the wording of one of Yehuda
Halevi’s most famous poems, the Revisionists’ hearts were in the uttermost west
though their bodies were in the east.

Orientalism at Home:Mizrahi
Jews in Palestine
and the State of Israel

In pre-1948 Palestine and the state of Israel, the Mizrahi
Jew, dwelling in a liminal zone between the European Jew and the Arab, has been
the subject of a Zionist orientalist body of knowledge and regime of
power.Twentieth-century Zionist
discourse about the meliorability and malleability of the Mizrahi Jew has
paralleled the previous century’s debates in Europe
about the improvement of the civil status of the Jews.Hegemonic Zionist sensibility feminized the
oriental Jew as irrational, sensual, inconstant and weak, just as European
discourse had feminized the Jew (and the oriental in general) for centuries
before.Derek Penslar’s essay, taking us
into the period of Israeli statehood, focuses on Israeli radio’s efforts to
marshal communications technology in order to nationalize the population.Radio was to speak to the oriental immigrant,
but it tried to do so by avoiding the immigrants’ Judeo-Arabic tongues, and it
spoke about them in frequently patronizing tones.Even state-owned Israeli radio, however, on
occasion gave the new immigrants the chance to speak for themselves, and from
the 1970s onward the mizrahi Israeli voice had become a formidable presence in
the media, politics, and culture.

Given this book’s theme of
tracing the modern Jewish response to the orientalist discourse surrounding and
directed against them, it is appropriate that Raz-Krakotzkin’s essay concludes
with a discussion of the Israeli political party Shas, a creation of Jews of
varied origins who, upon arrival in Israel, were lumped together under the
rubric of “oriental” Jewry, and in time created for themselves a unified
oriental Jewish culture where none had exited before.The mizrahi Jewish response to Zionist
orientalism is no less varied than that of Ashkenazic Jews in previous eras,
and it, too, is subject to change.

Indeed, one could argue that
although Jews the world over continue to hold orientalist stereotypes of
Muslims, in today’s world Christian perceptions of Judaism and Jews are
decreasingly likely to be refracted through an orientalist prism.Regardless of where one’s sympathies
regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict may lie, the conflict is viewed the world
over as one between an occidental state and an oriental people.In the United States the association between
Israel and the West is generally positive and framed in terms of an alliance
against fundamentalist Muslim terror, whereas the deep-seated hostility to
Israel in much of Europe stems precisely from its resemblance to Europe’s
bygone colonial regimes, which evoke painful sensations of shame mixed with
nostalgia.

Although orientalist
perceptions of Jews have all but disappeared in Europe,
they continue to flourish in some parts of the United States.In part because America itself has appeared to its
European settlers as a Promised Land, there is at the cultural and symbolic
level a potential, much exploited today, for pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli
sympathy in the United
States.Melani McAlister has provided a richly original reading of this sentiment,
including its orientalist allusions, in its effects on American policy in the Middle East, but also on ethnic and racial relations
within the United States.[38]Evangelical Christians, who display a
powerful biblicist orientalism, are the most visible and perhaps extreme
example.Before the evangelical gaze
contemporary Jews, particularly Israelis, become latter-day Hebrews, the center
of a sacred-historical epic that began in the Orient with the dawn of man and
will end there with humanity’s salvation. But most North American Christians often view
Jewish rituals as pleasantly exotic, and many a bemused Gentile, attending a
traditional Jewish Sabbath dinner or synagogue service, has felt himself or
herself to have been transported to an extra-territorial Orient, an embassy of
Semitic space.

On the other hand, orientalist
fantasy never played as important a role in North America
as it did in Europe, the front line against dar al-Islam in early modernity and, thereafter, its
conqueror.Jews in North
America have been perceived as white, hence European, and American
antisemitism has been relatively free of the European staple accusation that
Jews were a nomadic desert people.

Among Jews, the view of
themselves as an oriental people that one encountered in the 19th
and early 20th century has all but disappeared.Ironically, some contemporary North American
Jews are perturbed by what they see as Israel’s increasingly “oriental”
character, that is, the demographic growth and enhanced influence of Jews of Middle
Eastern origin on Israeli mores and culture.In the American Jewish imagination, however, the ascendancy of mizrahi
Jews is not nearly as threatening as the decline of secular Zionist ideology,
which sustained American Jews psychologically for decades, and the ongoing
growth in the number and power of Orthodox Jews, who deny the legitimacy of the
liberal denominations of Judaism to which most affiliated North American Jews
belong.Finally, the Arab-Israeli conflict,
which, as we write these lines, intensifies from day to day, has stifled
virtually all expression of romanticized kinship or even pragmatic commonality
between the children of Isaac and Ishmael.This is a tragedy, for although Jewish claims to propinquity with the
Orient frequently masked or justified claims of cultural superiority and
unfettered rights to land in Palestine, the future of Israel depends upon the
formulation of a mutually acceptable conceptual framework in which the Jews’
place as a sovereign collective in the Orient is assured.

[13]“Hybridity” is an important
concept in much of Homi K. Bhabha’s work.It is developed most particularly in some of the essays included in his
book, Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1995).

[14]
In what may have been his last publication Edward Said wrote that Freud’s image
of the Jewish people as founded by a foreigner (the Egyptian Moses) could be
taken as prototypical for non-European identities today, marked as they are by
the indelible impact of western domination.Edward W. Said, Freud and the
Non-European, with an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a Response by
Jacqueline Rose (London
and New York:
Verso, 2003).

[15]
See, for example, Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality," in Jacques
Derrida, Acts of Religion,
ed. by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 356-420.The term “Abrahamic” is also used in much the
same sense by Marc Gopin throughout his book Holy War, Holy Peace:How
Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East (New York, Oxford
University Press, 2002), although with no apparent reference to Derrida.

[23]
Vološinov, Valentin Nikolaevich, Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA, 1986), Part I, Ch. 3.This work is generally considered to have
been written by Bakhtin and published under his colleague Vološinov’s name for
political reasons under Soviet rule; some believe, however, that it is
genuinely by Vološinov or the result of collaboration between the two.